The 11th annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies invites graduate students to submit proposals that engage broadly with the notion of community. We welcome interdisciplinary submissions ranging in historical focus from late antiquity to the seventeenth century. Our topic is intended to be expansive rather than limiting; papers may conceive of community as a social, economic, intellectual, political, religious, ethnic, regional, or familial entity. Potential topics may include, but are not limited to: patronage, readership and interpretive practice, scientific or medical communities, family and kinship, faith communities, identity and subjectivity, membership and exclusion, manuscripts and printing, relations within or between groups, or the rhetoric of community.

This interdisciplinary conference will be held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on February 18 and 19, 2011. Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Deborah McGrady, professor of French at the University of Virginia and currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center, delivering a paper on French patronage and literary production during the Hundred Years War. The North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies is a cooperative venture between UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University.

The time limit for essays is 20 minutes. Paper proposals of no more than 250 words should be submitted to ncmems@gmail.com no later than December 15, 2010.